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Property damage from mice.

By Chris Williams on September 28, 2017.

Mice are very unwelcome guests in a home for a variety of reasons. Firstly, there is exposure to disease carrying organisms through contamination of food and food preparation surfaces with their urine and feces, and potential asthma triggers from this contamination also, but I want to focus on property damage caused by mice. Mice will chew on just about anything. Throughout my career in pest control, I’ve seen them damage upholstery in seasonal and year around homes, cushions of stored outdoor furniture, insulation in floors and ceilings by tunneling through and thus ruining its R-value, (not to mention the fouling with urine and feces) and phone lines. Also, I’ve seen them wreck electronic control panels for those ‘mini split ‘air conditioning units, insulation and electronics of a hot tub, and gnaw through plastic pipe for domestic water supplies (the one incident like this that I know about, it happened twice in the same dwelling!!)

I’ve seen damage to outdoor grills (fouling with nesting materials) and stoves where insulation was shredded and wiring was damaged through gnawing and of course fouling of any food utensils, bakeware stored in the unit. I saved the most heinous type of mouse damage for last and that is the damage they can do to automobiles. I’ve seen it happening for years and this past fall, it happened to me. My now spare car didn’t see a whole lot of use throughout the summer months, except for an occasional quick errand, but when it started having some drivability problems, not to mention all the idiot lights on the dashboard being on, well something was up. What was discovered by my mechanic were two mouse nests (with live ones!). One was in the engine compartment while the other was inside the cabin itself below the rear seats. It was here that mice had chewed through the wiring harnesses for the fuel pump causing short circuits that were responsible for all the codes and poor drivability. It cost me nearly $600 dollars in labor and parts (practically nil for parts) to trace and repair all the damaged electrical systems and get it running normal again. I hate mice!!